High speed data communication networks such as the Internet and private networks have spread virtually world-wide in recent years, allowing access to vast amounts of information from many types of devices ranging from large mainframe computers to portable devices such as so-called smart phones. Conversely, it has become largely immaterial where various data processing resources or interactive terminals are located. Therefore, data processing tasks can be and often are distributed over numerous data processors which communicate with each other through a network such as the Internet or virtual private networks (VPNs) while interaction with such resources can be achieved from a wide variety of fixed or portable devices at arbitrary locations. This capability, in turn, allows people and businesses with data processing needs to avoid some expenses for acquiring and maintaining data processing resources by acquiring such capability as services from a provider that then assumes such costs and responsibilities. Accordingly, the provision of such services is rapidly becoming a major industry, often referred to as “cloud computing”, which is a collective term referring to all such services that can be provided by networked data processing resources.
These services fall into three basic categories referred to as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and Software as a service (SaaS). IaaS provides basic networking, load balancing, content delivery and storage, data base management, routing, and hosting of operating systems. PaaS provides a platform for development of software applications with immediate abstractions of the underlying infrastructure. SaaS provides software solutions to system clients and access to data (including database management) that may be internal to a client system or delivered over a network such as the Internet. A cloud service provider (CSP) may provide any combination of such services to a client and the needs of each client may be substantially unique and involve an arbitrary degree of complexity. For example, each client will have different needs for data and each data base, in theory, will need to be uniquely organized, whether private to the client or commercially available to any client. Similarly, for software, the needs of each client will differ and may be extremely complex, such as for managing data delivery and documentation of large projects developed by large groups of persons having a wide variety of expertise in different subject matter areas, sometimes referred to as an enterprise or enterprise system through which communications, product development and documentation are accomplished. The cloud service provider must be able to provide customization of resources such as databases and software to meet the needs of clients, whatever those needs might be.
As an approach to developing software involving an arbitrarily high degree of complexity, so-called object oriented programming or system design was introduced about twenty years ago. The basic concept of object oriented design is to dissect a problem of any degree of complexity into a hierarchy of discrete portions, referred to as objects, with a sufficient degree of granularity that each object, itself, can be very simple and possibly generalized to allow re-use of previously developed software objects to perform, with suitable modifications, similar functions. Each object possesses attributes which can be inherited from objects higher in the hierarchy and encapsulates or hides properties of objects lower in the hierarchy. Each object has a function of returning a result when invoked and may require other objects or resources to perform various portions of that function while the process performed by any given object is not necessarily known to the object above it in the hierarchy which invokes the object. Thus any problem of any degree of complexity can be represented by a network of objects connected by pointers to other objects to invoke those objects and obtain a particular result in response.
Such object oriented design has the benefit of being able to leverage and re-use the software constituting each object since a given object may be invoked by any number of objects potentially having much different functionalities. Further, since properties of hierarchically lower objects are encapsulated or hidden, problems of compatibility between the processes performed by any given object are largely avoided. Since a given object can be used by different objects, the volume of software required for a given function and its cost of development are potentially minimized. On the other hand, a given object oriented design tends to be relatively rigid and difficult to modify or adapt.